Come along to the Walker Art Gallery as we open our doors until 10pm to celebrate LightNight and our spectacular exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. More than 30,000 people have already visited the exhibition with fantastic reviews. Featuring more than 120 paintings by leading Pre-Raphaelite artists, tickets are just £7 for adults and £5 for concessions (18 and under go free). And you can have fun recreating the flame-haired beauties from the paintings in the Big Booth photo booth. Use our fun box of props and create your own Pre-Raphaelite inspired look – and get a free photo print to take away with you. The café will be open to enjoy a coffee and cake, as will the shop where you can pick up our exhibition catalogue (£14.99), featuring new research into the Pre-Raphaelite movement in Liverpool.

Afro Supa Hero launch

Join us for the launch of Afro Supa Hero, an exhibition of comic books, action figures and games celebrating popular icons of the African diaspora at the International Slavery Museum. Be one of the first people in the city to see artist Jon Daniel’s unique and inspirational exhibition and join him for an exclusive tour of the exhibition and a question and answer session. There are plenty of other activities too, including comic book-making inspired by the 80s super hero theme and a chance to create a badge to match. The shop, on the ground floor of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, will also be open featuring a range of Afro Supa Hero merchandise.

Food!

No LightNight evening would be complete without making a stop to refuel, and what better place than at the Maritime Dining Room with stunning views across both the Albert Dock and Liverpool Waterfront. With firm favourites on the menu such as our renowned Lancashire beef burger and a good old bowl of Scouse, plus a bar, at great prices, it’s the perfect pitstop. A children’s menu is also available. Book your table by calling 0151 478 4056.

Flashback to 1986

Come along to Merseyside Maritime Museum and get into the party spirit as we celebrate LightNight with a nod to 1986, the year the Museum opened 30 years ago! Go back to the 80s – or introduce your kids to a fabulous musical era – with musical performances and craft activities.

Family fun at the Walker Art Gallery

Bring the whole family along for a fun-filled evening at the Walker Art Gallery. Children can explore their artistic talents with costumes, puppets, stories and crafts in our Big Art For Little Artists Gallery until 8pm. Take part in the family junk drumming workshops from 5.30-7pm, to experiment with different materials to create new sounds. And listen – or dance – to some fabulous performances from the Liverpool Show Choir, Regency Re-jigged and Barbershop Chorus.

So, as you can see, there is something for everyone at our venues this LightNight. Share your stories on Twitter and Facebook using #LightNight

]]>Guest blog: Grayson Perry on The Vanity of Small Differenceshttp://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/05/guest-blog-grayson-perry-on-the-vanity-of-small-differences/
Fri, 16 May 2014 11:09:07 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/?p=5107

Artist, Grayson Perry

I wanted the works to be large as I knew because of the TV series they would become very public artworks and a lot of people would want to see them at one time. They are also very bold and colourful because after working for so many years on ceramics where colour is often quite muted and difficult to predict and scale is necessarily small I enjoy the freedom and control offered by the medium. Also the tapestries needed to be large to accommodate the detail.

Most of my work involves a lot of detail; it is part of my style. In order for a tapestry to hold a lot of detail it needs to be large as in terms of resolution they are only about 75 pixels per inch, compared to 300 for normal printing. Though I was surprised how small details were picked up by the weave such as the text on the newspaper in the fourth tapestry ‘The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal’ (pictured below). Intricate detail, which is all very relevant to the narrative, encourages people to stay looking longer. I wanted these tapestries to be read like a short story, just as Hogarth’s print series ‘The Rake’s Progress’ was. Those eight paintings were the principle inspiration for my tapestries.

Taste, which was the central theme beneath my works, is a subject loaded with potential humiliation and often an excuse for ridicule. I wanted to some extent to extract the poison from the subject whilst acknowledging that the contemporary class system is a rich source of fun. Humour is a hugely important part of my work. It is central to being British and I always want to reflect the culture I belong to. In Britain we are very wary of earnestness and overt displays of sincerity so I always prefer tragedy to be bitter sweet. If the works provoke any warm emotions then I am very pleased but I do not set out to move the audience, I only set out to reflect my own feelings about the subject and the narrative. Having said that, social mobility is a theme very close to my heart.

I don’t think an artist has a duty to do anything, but I do though think it is very important for an artist to be unafraid of making work that is specific to their time and place. Any attempts at timeless, globally appealing art usually look kitsch and are doomed to become dated and irrelevant faster than anything. I hope people will look back and see a fairly recognisable picture of Britain in the 2010’s portrayed in these works. Not many people seem to notice that even though Tim’s life is portrayed over fifty years or so, all the scenes take place in 2012! I am fascinated by contemporary society and the forces that affect our behaviour. I am particularly concerned with those processes that we are not so aware of, the often unconscious ones, like taste and class.

]]>LightNight at the museumshttp://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2013/05/lightnight-at-the-museums/
Tue, 14 May 2013 12:58:31 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/LightNightAtTheMuseums.aspx

Dusk at Museum of Liverpool (c) Ben Kirkpatrick

There’s not long to go until Liverpool’s one-night arts festival, LightNight this Friday and here at the museums we’ve got plenty to offer.

Museum of Liverpool are celebrating ancient history with Big Heritage’s Roman Medicine Roadshow from 4-8pm. There’ll be the opportunity to join a workshop with a bone specialist who will demonstrate how we can learn about past lives from human remains; then watch Roman Gladiators fight it out and have their wounds healed using Roman herbal remedies. You can even look like you’ve been part of the battle by paying a visit to make-up artists, So Coco Rouge who will be using their skills to inflict battle wounds and scars on willing visitors.

Up at the Walker Art Gallery from 5-10pm there will be a feast for the senses with singing from Liverpool Community Choir and LIPA students taking place amongst the gallery’s artwork. Both groups will be singing songs inspired by this year’s LOOK/13 photo festival theme, ‘who do you think you are’. Then learn more about the gallery and its works with bitesize tours which will be running throughout the evening.

Little ones will be able to join the fun too as Little Liverpool at Museum of Liverpool is open until 6pm and Big Art at the Walker is staying up until 7.30pm.

This week is an exciting week for the Walker Art Gallery as we open our new exhibition, ‘ALIVE: In the Face of Death’ by world renowned photographer, Rankin this Friday. The exhibition forms part of the ‘LOOK/13: Liverpool International Photography Festival‘ which sees dozens of photographic exhibitions taking place across the city centre.

The theme for this year’s festival is ‘who do you think you are?’ Rankin’s exhibition explores this theme candidly, with portraits of people who know that their time is running out or people who have overcome great adversity. Though, rather than being morbid, the exhibition is about empowering the people in the portraits, celebrating their life and exploring people’s diversity of character.

On the same day that the exhibition opens, the Walker will also be until 10pm for LightNight, which sees cultural organisations and venues around the city centre throwing open their doors until late. This gives people an exciting and rare opportunity to take in a new exhibition after-hours. Liverpool Community Choir and LIPA students will also be performing songs inspired by LOOK/13’s theme making for an interesting atmosphere in which to discover ‘ALIVE: In the Face of Death’.

As well as Rankin’s new exhibition, there will be a further two LOOK/13 exhibitions open at the Walker for visitors to view this Friday; ‘Every Man and Woman is a Star’ looks at who Merseyside was with photographs by photographic chroniclers, Tom Wood and Martin Parr. Plus ‘Double Take: Portraits from the Keith Medley Archive’ will display portraits of Merseysiders shot twice using the same glass plate negative resulting in an eerie series of double shots.

This time in two weeks the city will be preparing itself for a long night of cultural celebration as organisations and venues across the city centre throw open their doors for LightNight on Friday 17 May.

I shall be posting a few blogs to round up some of the activities and events the museums have to offer. This week I’m looking at a venue that’s sure to wow people.

Light and new media artist, Andy McKeown is heading a project called ‘Fragments’ which will see a large scale series of projections wrapped across two sides of the Oratory. Originally the mortuary chapel to St James’s Cemetery, the Oratory is a National Museums Liverpool site that can be found within the grounds of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral.

The projection will be made up of photographs that Andy has taken of the Cathedral’s stained glass windows and will then be transformed into slow moving, brightly coloured kaleidoscopes. Judging from the pictures, ‘Fragments’ is not only going to be stunning to behold but will also showcase a kind of digital craftsmanship.

You can see these spectacular projections from 9.30pm-midnight on Friday 17 May.